Highlighted Session: Promising Partnership Models for Education in Emergencies: A Global-Local Analysis

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

This panel presents three facets of a large-scale research project on partnerships in education in emergencies, through the lens of the Syria refugee education response in Lebanon. The three-year vertical case study (2018-2021) was funded by Dubai Cares and its E-Cubed research envelope.
A recent shift towards partnerships in the humanitarian landscape motivated this study. Historically, humanitarian organizations worked alone, siloed from one another. However, humanitarian action has increasingly embraced notions of inter-agency collaboration. Through this cooperative environment, humanitarian actors seek to enable greater coordination between agencies in order to avoid duplication. Moreover, in addition to traditional actors—UN agencies, multilateral banks, bilateral donors, and non-governmental organizations—the private sector, including businesses and foundations, has increasingly engaged in humanitarian response. Humanitarian action also now prioritizes a “localization agenda” where actors and communities affected by crisis—or “beneficiaries”—are meant to engage in and inform crisis response at every step of the process. Humanitarianism, including policy-making, funding, and implementation, now rarely involves merely one or two agencies, but instead looks increasingly like a system that encompasses a wide network of global, national, and localized actors and organizations working in partnership.
In this context, we conducted a study to generate evidence on the nature and impact of partnerships in EiE, using the global educational response to the Syria refugee crisis in Lebanon as a case study. Four research questions guided this study: (1) What is the extent and nature of the global educational response to the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon? (Who is involved? In what ways? In partnership with whom?) (2) To what degree has the global educational response to the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon shifted over time? (2018-2021) (3) What are some of the “promising practices” of partnerships that promote the foundational tenets of coordination and community participation? (4) What are the impacts of these partnerships on (a) how coordination and community participation is experienced at the local level, and (b) with what potential effects, including on student retention, progression, and integration into local communities via education?
To answer these questions, we conducted a three-year (2018-2021) vertical case study, including over 100 interviews, 250 documents, a network analysis of 440 different organizations, and over 30 site visits and observations of partnership activities. These data, moreover, were collected during a time period that saw multiple crises within Lebanon and globally, including political and economic crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, and a devastating explosion in Beirut port. The study also coincided with the Black Lives Matter protests and a global reckoning on racism.
We found that partnerships in EiE have grown, diversified, and been shaped by crisis. Partnerships have increasingly embraced a range of actors who might support many different kinds of educational activities. And the crises that occurred over the course of our study appear to have accelerated the establishment of partnerships in EiE, driven by urgent needs for technology and resources.
Our vertical analysis of all data exposed an environmental shift in EiE that reflects increased marketization of the humanitarian response, in education and more generally. This shift is evidenced in two general ways; first, through increased private sector participation in EiE partnerships, where companies in particular have become more engaged; and second, through a more business-like approach to EiE, in terms of a competitive, outcomes-based, and data-driven environment that focuses on outputs and targets. Based on our research, partnerships that reflect this marketized approach—including an increase in business actors in conjunction with embracing more business-like ways of working—spur several critiques.
The study found that despite widespread agreement that participation of beneficiaries and localization of EiE efforts would contribute to the success of partnerships, each level of our analysis exposed the limited nature of both participation and localization. Further, our data exposed the resilience and creativity of local stakeholders and beneficiaries, especially teachers and students. The pivot to virtual learning, while challenging and not without problems, was done quickly and flexibly, with care, kindness, and humor. Our findings brought to light the vital work of local actors, how they embraced beneficiary participation, and how this helped to sustain education through a series of emergencies. We posit that participatory practices, including end beneficiary participation, helped to sustain partnership activities and in turn supported student retention in virtual school and their attendance in classes.
Power asymmetries arose as a key overarching theme that emerged from the vertical analysis, as well as how some partnerships manage to address power imbalances and create more meaningful partnerships. Issues such as discrimination, limited participation and localization, increased marketization, and poor coordination all contribute to and are shaped by particular power dynamics in EiE. However, those partnerships that addressed discriminatory practices, prioritized participation, took on a culture of mutual learning, and coordinated through communication and care, appeared to ameliorate such asymmetries.
From these findings we arrive at five intersecting guiding principles for partnerships in EiE: (1) care; (2) trust and respect; (3) ongoing and organic communication; (4) mutual learning and multi-directional knowledge sharing; (5) self-reflection and interrogation of power dynamics.
Each of the papers in this panel, presented by research team members, provides detailed overviews of separate facets to the study. Paper 1 gives context to the research and shares key findings from the vertical global-local analysis, derived from both qualitative interviews and network analysis, and analyzing the impact of key crisis moments including the COVID-19 pandemic. Paper 2 shares key insights from country-level establishment of partnerships focusing on how local actors experience partnerships. And Paper 3 provides the main overarching findings and conclusions from the full study, including the five guiding principles for partnerships in EiE, drawn from the study findings.
The panel will conclude with a discussion among the panelists regarding the broader implications of the study for partnerships in education in emergencies, including for collaborative and participatory policy, practice, advocacy, and research engagements.

Sub Unit

• Education, Conflict, and Emergencies SIG

Chair

• Nadeen Alalami, Dubai Cares

Individual Presentations

• Crisis upon crisis: Contextualizing the study and global-local analyses - Zeena Zakharia, University of Maryland College Park; Robin Shields, University of Bristol

• Partnerships in refugee education in Lebanon: Insights from country-level analysis - Ola Al Samhoury, Centre for LebaneseStudies; Maha shuayb, Centre for Lebanese Studies

• Guiding principles for promising partnership practices in education in emergencies - Francine Menashy, Brock University